


Pierce's Backstory

by stellacadente



Series: Dreams of Empire [5]
Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Headcanon, Other, Physical Abuse, Really Shitty Parenting, Sith Warrior class story spoilers, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 03:21:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5232011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellacadente/pseuds/stellacadente
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a brief bit of backstory for Lieutenant Pierce for my SWTOR fiction, The Spaces In Between, featuring my mostly light sided Sith Warrior, Xhareen. </p>
<p>Content warnings for physical and verbal abuse, suicide mention and really shitty parenting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pierce's Backstory

Lieutenant Pierce has no first name. By choice. He had his name legally changed in all his documentation to just “Pierce,” which happens to be his mother’s maiden name. 

Pierce grew up on Ziost, the son of an upper middle-management type in the civil service attached to the Imperial military, which is ubiquitous on the planet. The old man had a real fetish for the military, keeping memorabilia around the house and such, but for some reason, he had never joined. 

His mother had been a promising athlete, tall and strong and tough and beautiful in her youth. But an injury changed her plans to enlist in the military. Instead, she became a mathematics teacher – one of those stern but kind types that kids remember long after they’ve grown up. Pierce can only remember her ever smiling when they were outside, either playing some ball game or on a “secret picnic” with just his older sister Esmiala and himself in tow.

He was known as Junior back then, because Fate was cruel enough to have him named after the one person in the galaxy he despised the most. As much as he loved his mother, he could never understand why she had married his father. 

The old man was strict, by the book, no bullshit and don’t you ever show weakness, boy. At work, he was competent; feared and not liked. At home, Junior remembered him as emotionless, then later, he would grow meaner and, later yet, verbally abusive to his wife and daughter. 

Even past her prime and injured, she could have probably knocked her husband out with one punch. But in his eyes, she was weak, and “that girl” was weaker still. Because unlike the rest of them, Esmiala was of average height and on the thin side. He was never that way with Junior. He never coddled him, but he never hit him or insulted him. 

But Junior adored his older sister and despite being only a few years apart, they were remarkably close. They never fought, both of them afraid of incurring their father’s anger. 

One night when Junior was about 9 (and Esmi about 12), he overheard his parents arguing yet again. The old man accused his wife of having an affair and producing “that weakling girl who doesn’t even look like him.” His mother screamed back “She has your russet hair, and she looks just like that picture of your mother.” Then he heard a smack, and something falling to the floor, and silence.

The next night, the fight began at the supper table. Esmiala, who had certainly heard the fight the night before, got up to leave. The old man grabbed her by the arm so hard, she cried out. His mother stood up, and he let her go, and she ran to her room. 

The old man would never listen to reason. His wife offered to have the child’s genes tested, but he countered that her lover probably worked in the lab so he’d be able to rig the results. One night, after only a mild round of arguing, Esmiala came out to put her dinner plate in the dish refresher, as she’d given up trying to eat with the family anymore. Without provocation, the old man slapped her. The plate crashed to the floor. “Clean that up, you useless filth!” he screamed. 

Junior picked her up off the floor and took her back to her room, then came and cleaned up the plate shards himself. He was resolved then and there that the old man would never hit his sister again. 

It didn’t take long for him to have that resolve tested. The next day, the old man stayed home from work. He was at the door waiting when the kids came home from school. 

They were barely in the door when he wound up to hit the girl for not saying hello to him. Instead, Junior stepped up and took the punch. “Come at me again, old man, see if that makes you feel any better.”

But he didn’t strike out again. No, he was shattered like the dinner plate the night before. He had considered Junior to be like himself. The boy was the tallest in his class, played rough and tumble with other boys four and five years older and always came out on top. He’d been in some fights at school and always won; he’d never been disciplined because the old man always managed to smooth things out with the administrators with an odd gift of purloined contraband – exotic ales or smokes or even the occasional pack of spice. 

Now, he was the enemy, too. Just like those rebellious bitches. 

The old man seemed to shrink after that. He never lost his sharp tongue, but he didn’t swing his fists anymore, either. 

Still, the air in the house had grown thick and no one was relieved. After the end of the term, his mother announced that Esmiala would be sent to a boarding school on the far side of the planet. Her grades were superior and she was deemed a desirable candidate for eventual training on Dromund Kaas. The mother would accompany her for her indoctrination training. 

Three days before they were scheduled to leave, Junior woke up to an empty house. His mother and sister, already gone. They had left in the middle of the night. He called up the school’s office on the holo, but they’d never even heard of Esmiala.

He would learn years later that they had gone, instead, to an upscale academy on Dromund Kaas, Esmiala as a student and his mother as a teacher. She had recorded a long goodbye holo, but the old man had found it and destroyed it. 

The next six years went by in a haze. Junior was a good enough student that his occasional fights and insolence to his teachers was mostly overlooked. He stayed with the old man, who never mentioned his wife or daughter again. He never mentioned much of anything, and wordless nights in the cold, empty house were fine by both of them.

But by the time Junior was 15, nearly 16, he could take no more of this existence. He was already tall and broad enough to be mistaken for a grown man. He had hair in all the right places, too. So he did what he’d been considering doing for years now: He ran away, lied about his age, and enlisted in the Imperial military under his real name. 

He was fine with being a grunt. He didn’t need to be an officer because he was big enough and canny enough to read any situation. He’d figured out his old man’s weakness, and now, he applied that same eye to his enemies. They never stood a chance. 

On his first weekend leave, he meets up with a pretty young girl who turned out to be an accomplished data hacker. She helped him locate his mother and sister. He promised to come visit them both as soon as possible. 

But as Fate would have it, six months later, before he can get away to the capital world, his mother died of a cancerous disease. She was unable to afford adequate treatment, and had not told either of her children she was so ill. The old man, still her legal husband, had refused to send her any money or pull strings to get her help, though it is doubtful she would have accepted it. She’d simply run out of life and wasn’t looking for any second chances.

Junior applied for compassionate leave to go see to her burial. He and Esmiala had a tearful reunion, and she told him the whole story that she’d been able to figure out. Junior vowed to hop on the next shuttle to Ziost and throttle the old man, but Esmi stopped him. 

“I can’t really tell you what to do, brother, but I have a friend, an ex-Imperial agent who’s looking for some work. Maybe the two of you should talk.”

This is totally outside her normal mode of thinking, because Esmiala is in training to be a counselor to military trauma victims and families. But she had grown up watching her mother suffer for nothing and not be able to save her. No amount of glue could put her pieces back together again. She wanted her father to pay although she knew she could have no direct part in it.

Junior and the ex-agent (who may or may not wind up being someone on his future squad) plan out a scheme to get the old man accused of embezzling. Instead of getting him quietly canned, the scandal blows up into something public and messy. A few weeks later, the old man is dead of apparent suicide. Military investigators find suspicious circumstances, but also learn that he was such a jerk, they just check “suicide” and let it go. 

The next day, Junior changes his name to Pierce. Just Pierce.

One of his superiors gets wind of the death and the military investigation and is suspicious. He confides in an old buddy, now in Black Ops, who immediately recruits the young man, no questions asked. Pierce is wildly successful at it, gets a field commission, seems to be on track for the kind of life he wanted.

But when Black Ops was disbanded, Pierce found himself lost, adrift until he washed up on Taris, working for an incompetent bootlick Moff Hurdenn, who was at least ignorant enough to let Pierce find a lot of mayhem to keep himself happy.


End file.
